At the start of each month, Tor.com will offer a new ebook. The catch: you also sign up for Tor’s newsletter. Each ebook is available for seven days, and discussions about the book will take place on Tor.com.

This is a good way to build Tor’s email database. Everyone likes free stuff, and Tor will likely see how the email marketing campaign is working when it decides whether to continue the program. Because the site does say “We reserve the right to end this promotion at any time.”

Of course, this is a nice boon for authors as well as readers.

The club gets a book in front of readers who may not have heard about it before – although in Liu’s case, there may have been a number of Tor readers already aware of Liu’s work. A Chinese science fiction writer, Liu has won the Galaxy Award nine times and is a Hugo Award winner.

The Three-Body Problem has nearly 20,000 ratings on Goodreads, but other titles don’t seem as popular in Liu’s stable. Some of the titles have just a couple hundred ratings, small compared to his most popular book.

On Amazon, Problem typically sells for $9.99. So you’re getting a $9.99 value in the first month of the Tor.com eBook Club, and all for the price of getting another email to your inbox.

Once you sign up, the ebooks are offered in Mobi and ePub format. The deal is only for the U.S. and Canada, and that’s irked a few of the commenters on the Tor.com blog post.

Publisher’s note: As I discovered firsthand, my just-downloaded copy of the Liu novel is blessedly DRM free. I’ve caught up only with the ePub, but assume that the Mobi edition is likewise. Big thanks to TOR for not regarding its customers as criminals! In return, please respect the copyright. – DR

Unfortunately (and again), nothing in it for us outside North America, as the deal is only for the US and Canada.

bWe admire Tor for their position against DRM. But with respect to the related issue of geo-restrictions, they, like many other publishers, claim that they are completely in the hands of the right-holders. But publishers are still so many times more powerful than individual readers. Why do they accept crippling terms like this?

The result is often, that some books are not at all available to European readers in any legal way, not even from a European seller or at a different price. They just fall between chairs–lost sales and lost readers.

Jens complaint is a two way street. European and Australian books may not always been available in the United States.

It’s also amusing to note that, according to a NPR story, exporting physical books from other countries to the USA is a violation of copyright, thus illegal. I doubt many (if any) people are busted for this crime; however, a few years ago the American publisher of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest was chomping at the bit because their English edition was a year behind Europe’s and they were losing more than a few sales to overseas booksellers and wanted readers to stop buying from them for copyright’s sake.

As for TOR, they may not be “leagally” able to over the book club elsewhere.